Man makes progress toward his true calling despite bumpy road

When I first met Tony Rodriguez 21 years ago, I shrugged off his fascination with the inside of pianos as a short-lived preoccupation.

After all, he was just an 11-year-old kid. Tuning pianos was something that would grow boring or at least take a back seat as he grew, matured, developed other interests.

Man, was I wrong.

Tony Rodriguez, now 32, recently graduated from the world’s largest piano technology school in half the time it takes others. And if that weren’t in and of itself something spectacular, consider this:

Tony Rodriguez has battled his whole life with autism.

Because he absorbs information and expresses himself in ways that are subtly different from many of us, it has not always been an easy road.

As a young student, at least one classmate bullied him relentlessly, going out of his way to trip him in the hallway and mock his condition.

He has held several jobs since graduating from Union High School, but slopping floors and cleaning toilets and working an assembly line has done little to challenge his true calling.

“Nobody regards Tony until they see what he’s capable of doing,” says his father, Joe.

And that means anything to do with pianos.

“I had my first piano lessons at 10,” Tony says. “But I was more curious about how the insides worked. I was always wondering why some notes sounded different than others.”

He learned how to play, but he also went exploring, into the guts of a piano that is understood by few and ably controlled by fewer still.

By age 11, he was tuning pianos for family and friends, relying on his homemade vocabulary to relay sounds.

“I don’t like the bumpies,” Tony told me when I watched him work more than 20 years ago. “I like it smooth.”

He used other words as well — “grubby” and “blurry” — while he tuned that day.

Tony Rodriguez plays Bach on his organ.

His vocabulary has matured to a point where I still can’t understand him, but only because he’s mastered the proper lexicon to a degree that drops most jaws.

He speaks these days of higher partials and segments and intervals and unisons and coincident partials — the jargon of a master tuner.

For now, Tony enjoys status as an associate member of the Piano Technicians Guild. He needs to pass two more certification exams before he’s fully vested. Though he figures he could pass the tuning exam now, he has challenged himself to tune no less than 1,000 pianos before he sits for the test.

It speaks to his personality as a perfectionist, to the point of mild obsession.

His obsessive nature also explains, for instance, why he insisted on paying $800 to ship an old upright worth just $200 from Virginia to his home on Grand Rapids’ south side. He was fixated on three errant notes, couldn’t get them out of his head.

“An $800 lesson,” Joe says with a smile.

Joe and wife Linda have worked hard to avoid similar instances and worked to continue integrating Tony’s autism into mainstream activities. It helps that Joe is a clinical social worker and Linda a schoolteacher.

Tony details vehicles at Berger Chevrolet, where his work ethic also shines.

To attend the piano institute in Montana, he flew there by himself, staying in touch with his parents by cell phone as he made connections and guided himself through the process of ticketing, boarding, baggage claim and more.

“I wanted to risk it,” Tony says.

He abides by a positive mantra handed down by his parents: “You can do it unless you prove otherwise.”

Though autism continues to present challenges, Joe describes their son as being “at peace with himself,” adding that “his love for pianos endures since childhood and is reflected in how he treats each piano with respect, care and skill.”

One day, he would like to have his own shop, where he can restore pianos. And in his wildest dreams, Tony would like to build one from scratch.